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Did he really write "crap"? Come on. I mean, you may criticize a game without being offensive.

John Walker is someone who I just can't take seriously anymore. His reviews are often phrased in a way that a game is either the resurrection of Jesus Christ or a pile of stinking horse shit. There's just no nuance and balanced critique in his articles. The PC Gamer review seems a lot more fair in that regard. Ironically, 'the air being slowly let out of a whoopee cushion', sums up perfectly how I feel about RPS these days.

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That RPS review contains puzzle spoilers. I also thoroughly disagree with most of it (except for the parts about prettiness) but I'd recommend not reading this review until after playing through the first few puzzles from both Shay and Vella.

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I'm not reading any reviews right now to avoid act 2 spoilers, but John Walker has been vocal enough on twitter that I have an idea how he feels about it.

I generally like John's writing, but I've been reading his stuff for enough years to know I hardly ever agree with his opinions on point & click / adventure games. I don't care if he gave it a good or bad review, what I didn't like was him labelling reviews that liked it more than he did as "trite & sycophantic" on his twitter.

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I quite like John Walker when he's not giving opinions about media. I can't remember the last time I read an opinion of his about a game, a TV show, a film, or whatever else that I completely agreed with, so I tend to just ignore his reviews nowadays.

But it's tricky for me, as he's one of the few people who wrote about my game, and it was a positive write up, so going by pattern that might mean my game is awful, which I don't THINK it is

Anyway, it's all subjective and he can have his opinion if he likes, I just wish there was someone on that site (whose reporting and feature articles I generally enjoy) to balance him.

As for the Molyneux stuff, I think it was a misstep, and I do think that he was overly-defensive in how he handled the ensuing backlash from it. I think it could have been a learning moment, but he didn't seem to learn much.

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RPS are always overly defensive about what they write. And that's not just John Walker. And that's where the dissapointment lies for me, not what they think, but how they act. And Mr. Walker is sure being a dick on twitter today.

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Agreed there. I'm a little disappointed that he doesn't have the imagination to suppose that certain reviewers just didn't take issue with the things he did. That maybe they simply enjoyed it a whole lot and rated it accordingly, and that this isn't some sort of huge failure on their part.

I haven't had a chance to form an opinion of my own yet and so I haven't finished reading the review and I suspect EVEN some of the criticisms he makes are perfectly legit. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to come to the same conclusions about the over all worth of the game. I already enjoyed the first act much more than he did, after all, even though I agreed with some of his points in that review. Not because I'm not hard enough on the game, but just because my priorities are a bit different. Which is fine.

The ones I found so far with a scores. Lot's of 9's, nothing less then 7. I really don't care about scores myself, but I hope the dev team enjoys this. It's really good for a game with impossible expectations from the whole gaming community and market.

Have just started to replay act 1 again, so I'm far off being able to judge the complete game myself. And I'm going to take my time with this.

The ones I found so far with a scores. Lot's of 9's, nothing less then 7. I really don't care about scores myself, but I hope the dev team enjoys this. It's really good for a game with impossible expectations from the whole gaming community and market.

Have just started to replay act 1 again, so I'm far off being able to judge the complete game myself. And I'm going to take my time with this.

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Metascore for act 1 is 82, where as ac 2 is at the moment at 88. Broken Age Complete Adventre (which is PS4 version I presume) Metascore is 90. I think it might be among the best scoring adventure games, if not the best scoring, of recent years.

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Its ephemeral, dream-like quality makes the game feel less intimate and quotable than some of Schafer’s previous efforts, but if anything this is a refreshing change of pace. Rather than relying on the same emotional tricks, Schafer and Double Fine opted to tell a different kind of story; like Shay and Vella, they learned from those that came before without feeling compelled to follow in their predecessors’ exact footsteps. As a result, Broken Age is a resounding success; a charming, quietly subversive, and ultimately uplifting parable about finding beauty in the broken.

RPS also has their new article from John Walker up, but I'm not going to link to that. And that's not because he didn't like the game, but because I think he's being a dick about it. People who want it knows where to find it.

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To be fair, while I think John Walker IS being a bit of a dick about not liking Broken Age particularly in reference to the other reviews on twitter (I don't know why he can't just acknowledge that other people have different priorities and preferences with games instead of dumping on their review technique)...

I DO think the new article makes a -few- reasonable points (even though I'm not sure why he felt the need to write it).

The point about the weirdly contrived stuff we're expected to believe about Shay's situation is a point I've made myself here, and I do think certain things about how it resolves are poorly explained and weaken the narrative a little in comparison to how things were set up in Act 1. I just don't think it's all dreadful like he seems to think, and part of that is probably because I had a much better time with the puzzles than he did.

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I frankly don't understand any of the complaints about the puzzles. I haven't consulted any guides or received any tips, and I think the puzzles are all perfectly reasonable, though I have gotten stumped for a little while on a few occasions. But you are SUPPOSED to get stumped for a little while sometimes on adventure games, right?

Probably the complaint I've seen the most is people complaining about the wiring puzzles, but really? Have these people never played any of the Myst games? The wiring puzzle is exactly the sort of thing you would have had to figure out in a Myst game, but the Myst version would have been even more unforgiving. Like with the little symbols and everything? Does anyone remember trying to decrypt the geometric number system to hack into the golden spheres in Riven? Jesus, if you can't handle the wiring puzzles then don't ever play Riven.

I think John Walker might currently be going through an ego trip similar to what Ben Kuchera went through a couple of years ago as the editor at the now-defunct PAR.